Mamet With the Mute Button On

LONDON — What happens when you go to the theater anticipating a car crash but witness a sideswipe instead? An answer can be found at the new London revival of David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow,” in which Lindsay Lohan braves the stage for the first time. And if a onetime “it girl,” better known of late for her life in the tabloid pages, seems a shade cautious as a theater performer, it should be noted in her defense that almost everything about this production comes with the mute button on.

That sense of hesitancy isn’t ideal for this particularly tough-minded satire, first seen on Broadway in 1988 with a then stage neophyte by the name of Madonna occupying Ms. Lohan’s current role. A husky-voiced Ms. Lohan gets through the evening well enough, and is certainly better cast than her strangely indrawn co-star Richard Schiff, but this play needs to fire on all cylinders from the very start for it to work. Not for nothing is the word “speed” in the title.

Directed as if from the sidelines by Lindsay Posner, Mr. Mamet’s tightly coiled dark comedy seems to have become gently unstrung, as if those involved were afraid to jump headlong into the challenges of a short, sharp text that should keep you aloft on the sheer verbal adrenalin exhibited by this dissection of America at its most aspirational.

The set-up is deceptively simple. The putative mogul Bobby Gould (Mr. Schiff) is newly installed in his office and is busy planning, with his longtime chum Charlie Fox (Nigel Lindsay, the cast’s lone English performer), the next bit of celluloid schlock by which Hollywood profits. Into their determinedly male preserve comes a temp secretary, Karen (Ms. Lohan), bringing with her coffee and, perhaps, a new perspective.

Image

Nigel Lindsay plays Charlie in “Speed-the-Plow.”CreditSimon Annand

Why, Karen wonders, do movies have to be “garbage” and not aspire to art? Her question is put to the test when Bobby gives this keen newcomer an unfilmably ponderous book — sample extract: “And that vouchsafed to him a vision of infinity” — to look at and later uses it to try and lure her home. What happens next is best left opaque for those who may be new to the play, beyond pointing out that the denouement depends in every way on the restoration of the equilibrium between Bobby and Charlie while Karen — quite explicitly — gets shown the door. In a play in which buddy movies figure within the plot, male bonding is the order of the day.

The quick-witted relationship between Bobby and Charlie — described in the text as contemporaries who are “around forty” — is important to our sense of the pair as vaudevillians of a sort, who goad one another on to ever grander delusions of power. In one wonderful moment, Bobby imagines the two becoming so rich that they will have to employ someone “just to figure out the things we want to buy.”

So it’s somewhat surprising to find Mr. Schiff, who is not quite 60, emerging more as a father figure to the suited thug that is Mr. Lindsay’s Charlie, a hustler who thinks purely in terms of money when Bobby inhabits a world decent enough to allow people into the discussion. (Charlie doesn’t care about being branded an “old whore” as long as he’s a “rich” old whore.)

The off-kilter rhythms between the two men get the crucial opening volley of language off to a skewed start, with Mr. Schiff so underplaying Bobby’s newly elevated self as Head of Production — Robert Innes Hopkins’s set shows an office mid-decoration — that one struggles to find the defining camaraderie built up over many years that Karen’s arrival abruptly puts to the test.

Ms. Lohan, for her part, must have known the minute she read the script that Karen has numerous lines that could be seen to dovetail with the actress’s own experience both within the play and well beyond it. “I don’t know what to do. (Pause) I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” Karen remarks not long after making her first entrance, and one can imagine Ms. Lohan voicing somewhat the same comments in rehearsal as a newbie to the ways of the stage.

Once Karen gets fired up by the book she’s been asked by Bobby to read, she speaks of knowing “what it is to be bad ... (and) lost.” That sequence, by Ms. Lohan’s own account in press interviews, had been eliciting knowing chuckles during previews, as is to be expected given her own history — slavishly followed by the media — in and out of rehab (and jail). The opening night audience, happily, remained courteous throughout.

Image

Bryan Dick and Charity Wakefield in ‘‘Seminar’’ at the Hampstead Theater.CreditAlastair Muir

In fact, this role in some ways lets a sleekly attired Ms. Lohan — she gets three party-friendly outfits, one for each scene — test her chops in comparative safety, since its combination of naïveté and earnestness springs naturally from the situation at hand. (There’s the separate question, open to debate, of just how naïve Karen actually is.) There’s been much talk of Ms. Lohan starting afresh by doing theater, though on this evidence I wouldn’t say a stage star is born. It’s more that the play allows Karen’s insecurities to merge with those of the woman playing her, and the character’s gathering confidence by the third scene can be viewed as Ms. Lohan’s, as well.

However, it’s really only Mr. Lindsay as the hard-driving Charlie who seems to the Mamet manner born, his voice cracking in panic near the end as he envisages a life of lucre slipping away. That the status quo is soon restored honors the Boy’s Own landscape that Mr. Mamet long ago marked out as his even if this production would never have happened without its leading lady. Clearly the theater, rather like the movies, isn’t above selling a commodity — in this case Ms. Lohan’s own bid for career redemption — in order to make a buck.

“Seminar” felt entertaining but glib when I first saw this Theresa Rebeck play three years ago on Broadway. In its London premiere, at the Hampstead Theater, it mostly seems glib. And not a little contrived in its depiction of a handful of writing students who gather in a high-walled, rent-controlled Manhattan apartment to have their work — and themselves — eviscerated by Leonard (a scowling Roger Allam), their rancorous writing teacher.

Leonard is apparently some kind of genius, though one has to take that on faith, just as one is asked to accept the play’s 11th-hour turn toward the sentimental, trading on the hoary plot device whereby a student — Bryan Dick’s amiably geeky Martin — ends up instructing his professor and equilibrium of a sort is achieved.

Quite why these seemingly capable young people are prepared to pay $5,000 to be snarled at by a mentor who can’t get beyond the first five words of a fledgling novel from the anxious Kate (Charity Wakefield, exhibiting a pitch-perfect American accent) beggars belief, especially in New York of all cities. And I’ve rarely seen any play about writing with so little to say on the actual topic. “The work is hollow,” a disapproving Leonard intones at one point. I wouldn’t disagree.